The ongoing legislative session has done nothing to warm relations between Albuquerque Public Schools Superintendent Winston Brooks and Public Education Secretary-designate Hanna Skandera and her boss, Gov. Susana Martinez.
Brooks said this week he will continue to oppose Skandera’s key education bills – one dealing with teacher evaluations and the other allowing students to be held back if they can’t read after third grade despite intervention efforts to help them – as the session enters its final week.
“I hate to be painted as a naysayer about everything,” Brooks said, emphasizing that he supports alternative versions of both bills that have similar goals but different approaches.
Brooks also criticized the pace of Skandera’s reform agenda, saying it should be more slow and careful.
“I think instead of trying to shove this stuff down everybody’s throats, we ought to be a lot more thoughtful,” he said. “We’re talking about kids’ lives and adults’ lives.”
The state Education Department says Skandera’s reforms are good policy that APS has consistently opposed during the session.
“Through a lobbyist, APS has opposed these essential reforms every day in every committee,” Public Education Department spokesman Larry Behrens said.
Behrens disagreed the process is moving too quickly. Speaking of the teacher evaluation legislation, he said the bill was developed with suggestions from a task force that held open meetings over the course of three months. The panel, he said, included teachers and other school leaders and had a combined 100 years of classroom experience.
Brooks, who has engaged in verbal back and forth with Martinez’s administration, said he supports ideas such as focusing on early reading and evaluating teachers based on student academic growth – he just doesn’t support the particular bills pushed by Martinez and Skandera.
The alternative reading bill supported mainly by Democrats would not deal with retention, but would mandate extra remediation for students who struggle in the early grades. It is sponsored on the Senate side by Sen. Linda Lopez, D-Albuquerque. At least one version of Skandera’s preferred bill has been amended so parents could veto retention if they have demonstrated consistent involvement and high attendance.
The teacher evaluation alternative favored by many Democrats would convene a group of mostly teachers to develop a new evaluation system. The bill suggests a system that would not rely on standardized tests, but instead would use “student learning objectives,” or measurable goals that teachers set for their students.
Brooks supports both alternative bills. He said his main objection to Skandera’s teacher evaluation bill is that teachers in grades or subjects that do not fall under statewide testing would be evaluated partly on the basis of their school’s letter grade.
“I don’t understand how a teacher who has little or no responsibility for the teaching of reading and math can be partly evaluated by their school’s reading and math scores,” Brooks said. “We have an issue right now: Band teachers and other non-tested subject teachers are already exploring the idea of leaving their current schools. They don’t want to be partly evaluated based on a letter grade they didn’t have much to do with.”
Skandera’s teacher evaluation bill calls for a school’s A-F grade to be used in evaluating teachers whose grade level or subject is not measured by the state test.
Brooks said he agrees with using test score improvement to evaluate teachers, and he said APS is piloting such a program in four schools, which will rely partly on student test score growth. The pilot will use value-added modeling, which controls for factors like whether students are in poverty or still learning English.
“I have always been supportive of looking at ways we can do the value-added model. I don’t agree with this one,” Brooks said of the Public Education Department’s plan.
“We have expressed that numerous times to the PED, and it has fallen on deaf ears. There appears to me to be a lot of negotiations going on with an awful lot of people, except for APS.”
Behrens said the department gathered significant input in creating the teacher evaluation bill.
Skandera said Wednesday she does not support the alternative bills. She said teacher evaluations should include some objective measures like test score growth, which she said is good policy, and is necessary for the state to get a federal waiver from the No Child Left Behind Act.
On Thursday, the White House announced New Mexico was the only state that initially applied for a waiver and did not receive one. However, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan indicated New Mexico is still in the running to receive a waiver at a later date.
Skandera also said the alternative reading bill was too broad, with a focus on both reading and math. She said it’s important to keep the bill focused on reading.
“Research shows reading is a gateway subject,” Skandera said.
Lopez’s bill has been amended and is now limited to reading, which Skandera said is encouraging but doesn’t guarantee the amendment will hold when the House and Senate merge versions.
She also said she is concerned because Lopez’s bill allows school districts to choose their own kindergarten assessments, while her preferred bill would use a common assessment statewide. She said this is important because it would create consistency for students who move among districts and would create a statewide cost savings.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal
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